Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is a hard review for me to write because I *love* America's Test Kitchen. I am a long time fan and have been very happy with every other cookbook I've bought from them - normally, their recipes are amazing. But this cookbook is completely pointless. The whole advatage of the slow cooker is that the food is quick to put together and "leave it to cook" while you go about your day. That is really the ONLY advantage to using a slow cooker - otherwise, you just pull out your regular pots and pans and do it the "normal" way. This book completely does away with that whole advantage. Almost every single recipe calls for "pre-cooking" [parboiling, blooming, poaching, etc] some of the ingredients with another method [in the microwave or on the stove top or in the oven] before you put them in the slow cooker. Many of the recipes also call for "browning" the finished dishes off under the broiler at the end too. A majority of the recipes also require you to come back and add certain ingredients at certain times during the cooking process, so you would have to be constantly hovering over the slow cooker through the day. The amount of prep work for most of the recipes is complicated too. Sometimes you have to cook one ingredient in the microwave while you parboil another ingredient on the stove and also do some special preparation for the meat so it isn't too mushy, for example... I mean, it is just a LOT of different steps that make the process of cooking dinner entirely too complicated. Why would anyone do this? I did not find a single recipe in this book that I would try - yes, they all look delicious [and I'm confident that they ARE delicious, based on my experience with America's Test Kitchen recipes] but I could make every single one of them more easily, more quickly, and much more efficiently on the stove top or in the oven. Why would I dirty up all these other prep tools and dishes AND my slow cooker? What is the point? Using this book will take up more of your time, give you many more dirty dishes to wash, will take longer than any conventional recipe, and will be much more complicated than any "normal" slow cooker recipe. This cookbook is the WORST of both worlds and totally negates any advantage using a slow cooker would give you. This one is a dud. I'm sorry to say it, but it is true.